I remember walking through the fields in March, when I lived on the farm. The hayfields invariably grew after the last cutting, but rarely more than eight or ten inches. Sometimes the clumping lumpiness of the fields survived the winter. But, more often, the snows flattened them. And when the wind came in March, the flattened and bleached-out grass would winnow in the wind, not like the waving patterns of the near-ripened wheat or barley of summer, but still somehow the same 'picture' of the wind, now running along the ground and separating and joining the blades, as if ground and wind were intimate, and the dead grass only a creature of the season.
            The wind was always raw. Warmth in March comes with the clouds sitting down on the hills. The enclosing sense of the rain has a peculiar feel in March, in that momentary warmth from the Gulf, when 50 degrees seems mild - almost like the balminess of a calm and warm summer night. But then the wind comes and blows the southern air out with the raw western or northwestern turn, a steady wind, running the grass uphill on our farm and the next.
            What I remember, however, is the grass and the raw wind, the nearly colorless blades, shifting from the rootstocks in a nerveless motion, and the sense of finality, of something ending without any return.

            The season seems to have broken. Cold and snow are possible to the end of March. But we've had several random days above freezing around the clock. Our brief mud season is over, if we get no more extended cold. The pussy willow in the yard is pretty well into its full catkins. For some reason, the bulbs were late this year in poking up the tips of their leaves. Normally, they show some sign by the middle of January, or even before. But this year they began for the most part in February. The quince buds are opening the tiny rounds of the early leaves, giving a slight green to the shrub on a near view.
            So the seasons progress.
            But somehow, I am still suspended in that strange March hiatus, that interval that has no origin or conclusion.

            Since I have now moved downstairs and shifted from handwritten notes and notebooks to the formal writing on the computer, I commonly find myself sitting in front of the screen in the 'off season', hoping for that rare evening session when the clear energy returns. Instead, I generally wind up playing solitaire, after reading the late headlines in the newspapers. This computer is too old to play the contemporary videos with any continuity. But I doubt I would be a You Tube kind of guy in any case. So last night I googled 'book reviews', and started clicking through. I landed at Salon and wound up reading a review of a book by Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, about the last months of her life, and then clicking through to the interview with Rieff. Finally, I clicked on the posts in response to the interview.

            I think I may be characteristic, given my background as an outland New Yorker and an intellectual, in my feeling that Sontag was one of those writers that I was 'supposed' to read. But every time I picked up one of her essays or essay books, I had this supreme sense of lassitude, after a sentence or two. Finally, I have only read a handful of review statements, usually embedded in writings about other topics, so, theoretically, I am not qualified in any respect to talk about her work.
            But I am enough of a 'New York intellectual' (words I intentionally avoided conjoining in my last paragraph), to go ahead anyway. Precisely my reaction after reading the opening sentences and flipping through the essay to read a few more at random suggests to me a valid response. I always felt that I was looking at something that, in the case of the book length essays, could have been written out as a thesis in two or three pages of clear prose, a thesis that would have then been self-evident and self-explanatory. The problem, of course, is not just that that would have obviated the book without getting the notice and notoriety. But it's also a question of whether the topic or the theme, when presented directly, would have seemed as intelligent or sophisticated as the presentation implied.
            I generally avoid calling myself a New York intellectual precisely because this seems to be characteristic of the New York intellectual. New York is the core of the 'public' level attitudes of 'post-modernism'. In the case of New York, however, it comes out of an historical, if tangential glorification of the commercial 'mind' as somehow deeper than it seems. A cynicism that denies core value dresses itself in a putative density of value. But all of it actually is designed for a mind that may 'read as it runs'.
            Here is the paradox of the New York intellect, which ostensibly favors a stripped out simplicity in both thought and language, but is therefore an absolute mark for an overbearing, if artificial compression - a pseudo-density, if you will. It was my objection to Mailer. He was hailed as a philosopher, when in fact his 'intellect' was a kind of rococo street noise, the doubling back of the hipster hustler, freighted with a density of vocabulary. Untwist the words, and the thought was not only simplistic, it was often truism or cliché.

            I have no intentions of reading Rieff's book. The fact that Sontag, supposedly dedicated to the truth and straight shooting, absolutely denied her disease, purportedly in the name of 'hope', sends me immediately into the most neutral corner of my intellectual habitation, namely the grand room of 'I don't care'. But I do care, in the sense that the whole structure that emerges, not only in the relationship between Rieff and Sontag - which Rieff avoids describing so assiduously that he makes it perfectly clear - but also between Sontag and her audience, with Rieff now included in that admixture, is also unbelievably archetypical.

            If I suggest that there was and is a wide space here for 'recovery', can I be sued for libel? Or will I merely be attacked for defamation of character, a possibility evident from the subsequent posts. Strange, I thought New York was the inverse of Hollywood. In Hollywood, we all pretend to be clean and happy teenagers until we're 45. If we screw up, we publicly go into rehab. But, in New York, the presumption now is that you begin in rehab and basically go downhill until both you and 'it' are unbearable. At which point you clean up your act, but still wait another 20 years to write your 'raw, wrenching' memoir.
            There is something raw and wrenching in Sontag's final descent toward death. But it has to do with her attitude as well as the savagery of the disease. And Rieff's apparent unwillingness (at least according to the review and the interview) to go into any dimension of the emotional, I see, not as a virtue, but as a reinforcing element in the whole of the disturbing image, the disturbing anti-harmony, if you will - the layers of the abyss.

            I identify myself as an 'outland' New Yorker. And this is largely why. San Francisco looks overbearing now, compared to the oversized village I lived in 35 years ago. Boston, when I lived there 30 years ago, struck me as a den of thieves. But it, too, seems to have changed radically, whatever experience on the streets might be nowadays. But New York was always overbearing, although, until the construction of the World Trade Center and the subsequent structural disregard for the pedestrian, it always seemed somehow a 'human' force, however crushing.
            But it's not that I subsequently despaired of the mindset. When I was 15 on the farm and reading the New Yorker, I understood and disagreed with the aesthetic and the 'philosophy', such as they were.
            But it is as seductively alienating as the wind in the March grass to see it up close again.